Fifth Sunday in Lent

‘I find nothing in theological Christianity to be more difficult for me to apprehend than the conception of Jesus Christ as a dying and reviving God. The Incarnation-Atonement-Resurrection complex shatters both the… Hebrew Bible… and the Jewish oral tradition. I can understand Yahweh as being in eclipse, desertion, self-exile, but Yahweh’s suicide is indeed beyond Hebraism.’


- Harold Bloom




‘His emergence on earth was as it were the swelling in of heaven. His sacrifice began before He came into the world, and his cross was that of a lamb slain before the world’s foundation. There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all. His obedience, however impressive, does not take divine magnitude if it first rose upon earth, nor has it the due compelling power upon ours. His obedience as man was but the detail of the supreme obedience which made him man. His love transcends all human measure only if, out of love, he renounced the glory of heavenly being for all he here became. Only then could one grasp the full stay and comfort of words like these, ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ Unlike us, he chose the oblivion of birth and the humiliation of life. He consented not only to die but to be born.’


- P.T. Forsyth